Many of you who have the...ahem....pleasure of having an Internet Service Provider (ISP) that has decided to throttle or completely block connections to various legal sites are probably well-aware of the stranglehold these companies have been having on Internet access. If you live in the United States, you'll be happy to know that the FCC has started to do something about it.
OpenInternet.gov is, essentially, the FCC's answer to ISP Internet censorship. The FCC's goal is to help preserve an open and free (as in speech) Internet, they way it's meant to be.
It seems they've realized that the Internet is a truly free platform, and for it to thrive, it has to stay that way.
Historian John Naughton describes the Internet as an attempt to answer the following question: How do you design a network that is “future proof” -- that can support the applications that today’s inventors have not yet dreamed of? The solution was to devise a network of networks that would not be biased in favor of any particular application. The Internet’s creators didn’t want the network architecture -- or any single entity -- to pick winners and losers. Because it might pick the wrong ones.
For the Internet to survive, information must be shared freely and can't be restricted from lack of support, either on the client end (through things such as poor browser support), the ISP end (they don't like a site, so they're going to throttle the traffic on their networks to it), or on the hosting end (unreasonable restrictions on technologies for hosting).
We've seen the effects of a stagnant network at least once -- when Internet Explorer 6 had an undisputed monopoly over viewing the Internet. If you don't think so, get your hands on IE6 and try viewing any modern website in it. It will probably have a heart attack. Once W3C-compliant browsers came into the picture and started having an influence over Microsoft, the quality of the Internet expanded exponentially. We now don't just have static, table-based pages with nothing but text and poorly-optimized pictures. Instead, we have feature-rich, dynamic web applications. Being solely on the web is vastly becoming more the advantage, as opposed to a painful disadvantage. This very site wouldn't even be possible if it weren't for the changes that happened with "Web 2.0."
Why would someone want to censor that? Why should anyone even be allowed to censor that? Even inaccurate information shouldn't be censored, but rather corrected, so that everyone can see the difference between accuracy and inaccuracy.
The FCC, it seems, feels the same way. They also know that "speaking with your pocketbook," doesn't really work with ISPs, particularly because most people still don't have that choice. The ISPs in this country also control the physical lines, and many of them have localized monopolies in any given area and won't hesitate to go to local and state governments to keep it that way. To start remedying this, the FCC has started taking action to break the control that comes with monopoly situations.
While I prefer to have government intervention kept to a minimum, I do believe that some situations do, in fact, warrant government intervention. I also believe that the situation with this country's ISPs is one of those situations, and will remain such as long as they also control the infrastructure.
I find this topic interesting because I made a lot of money as an ISP. I founded and grew the largest ISP in Wyoming. I sold out right at the peak of the tech bubble but I still dabble. I did not throttle any sites but I did refuse to host some websites and I refused service to some spammers
The only company I can think of that routinely throttled websites was America Online and they were not really an ISP. They were an online service that pre-dated most of the public internet with proprietary content.
I am wondering which ISPs you are talking about and what sites they were blocking..
On a global scale, I've seen complaints of throttling and censoring from places not only like China, but also Australia and Canada.
In the United States, Comcast has been notorious for limiting Internet access (and is one of the major reasons for the net neutrality issues to begin with), and I know from personal experience that Insight throttles "high usage" users. AT&T is actually actively working with the MPAA and RIAA to set up a "fingerprinting system" which many have concluded will lead to a filtering system. Time Warner Cable is also testing a tiered system that would limit peer-to-peer sessions.
On a similarly-related note, ESPN worked out deals with some ISPs for viewing their video content, but provides no way for individuals who don't have those ISPs to subscribe to that content on their own. This is a blatant violation of net neutrality by a content provider, working with ISPs (which isn't covered by the FCC's current actions, I don't think, but is still an example of net neutrality violations).
In at least the United States, this is done under the guise of trying to stop illegal peer-to-peer file sharing, but its effect is far more reaching than that. The problem is, not only is not all peer-to-peer file sharing actually illegal, but it doesn't affect just peer-to-peer sharing. Anyone with a Netflix account and uses their "Watch Instantly" feature (especially HD) with any kind of regularity on any of the ISPs that are throttling their connection, will notice huge differences in the quality of the shows and movies they legally paid for to watch, when the ISP starts throttling the connection (I'm talking taking a program that's supposed to be available in HD and taking it down to a quality that makes it pretty much unwatchable because it's so pixilated that it makes a poor-quality, enlarged Youtube video look high-quality in comparison).
And before you contest the idea that not all BitTorrent traffic is illegal, I direct you to ElectricSheep.org, a collaborative abstract art project that uses BitTorrent to download "sheep packages" (sets of art pieces that are displayed as a screensaver), and Blizzard Entertainment, which uses BitTorrent to make distribution of their patches (which are sometimes as large as a gigabyte) more efficient, just as two examples.
The only company I can think of that routinely throttled websites was America Online and they were not really an ISP. They were an online service that pre-dated most of the public internet with proprietary content.
AOL was (and technically speaking, still is, but it's a shadow of its former self) an ISP. ISP stands for Internet Service Provider. They had proprietary content, yes, but they also provided Internet access the same way any other dial-up ISP did/does. Technically, you didn't have to run the AOL browser in order to access the Internet, you just had to use the dial-up tool and had to keep the AOL browser open.
I am treated as evil by people who claim that they are being oppressed because they are not allowed to force me to practice what they do. ~D. Dale Gulledge
The FCC won't be able to do much to address the international examples. To my knowledge they do not have jurisdiction over China.
You are wrong about AOL. They did not start our as an internet service provider. It was a big deal when they opened up access to the world wide web to their customers. Prior to that, the only internet based service they offered was email. I was very worried about them when they transformed into an ISP but it turned out that they were inept and therefore easy to compete with.
Throttling high usage users is a terms of service issue. I assume your usage maximum is spelled out in a contract? You pay a certain amount of dollars and you get to use a certain amount of bandwidth? Why is that a problem? You get what you pay for. If you need a broader pipe to the internet you can always order a T1 or a T3. It won't be cheap but bandwidth is expensive. Without these types of usage limits, a few users would hog all the bandwidth and everybody else would suffer. The internet is a shared and limited resource and has been since the beginning.
And it is not like most ISPS have monopoly power. There are few places where customers do not have substantial choices so if they don't like one ISP they can move on to another. For example in my small town (15,000) in Wyoming, there are at least three independent ISPs that offer dial-up and broadband DSL. Most of the national providers also provide local access numbers. Two of those local ISPs also offer highspeed wireless connections. The cable company offers highspeed cable. It can be ordered in fast or faster. Both of the major phone companies offer DSL. And both of the phone companies and the cable company will sell much higher speed (frame relay fractional T1, T1 and T3) pipes. And both of the Cellular companies(Verizon and Altel) offer broadband connections. If a little town in Wyoming has that many choices, I suspect the vast majority of the US population has access to many more.
As far as illegal activities go, like most peer to peer networking, ISPs can be held liable if they knowingly allow it to continue over their networks. This leaves them in a catch-22 situtation where they are damned if they do and damned if they don't, Perhaps they should be given some kind of safe harbor. Most ISPs are terrified of being held responsible for the actions of their users and want nothing to do with being a watchdog. Perhaps the FCC should relieve them of this burden.
Now I do agree to some extent that it is wrong for companies to block legal internet based services. But you do also get into some complex issues about property rights. For example, most of the largest ISPs are telecommunications carriers and they are in the business of providing telephone service. They invested a LOT OF MONEY to BUILD the telecommunications INFRASTRUCTURE that make the internet possible. THEY OWN IT. IT IS THEIR PRIVATE PROPERTY. They should have a LOT OF SAY over how their property is used. To the extent that this say is taken away from them, it is a confiscation of property and is pretty un-American.
I think they have a fairly valid point when they block services that utilize their infrastructure to undercut their core business and very arguably use this as a means for unfair competition. That is like being forced to buy the knife that slits your own throat. SKYPE is a a good example. They are essentially a parasite. They have a nice piece of software but they have not invested hardly a dime in telecommunications infrastructure. They are making money by selling a product (international bandwidth) that everybody else except them payed for. I like SKYPE and use it particularly when I travel internationally because it is a tremendous bargain. But I understand it is a bargain because they are able to sell their service for below the marginal cost of the companies who actually made the investment in the infrastructure. It is no wonder the telephone companies who actually invest in the bandwidth hate them and I don't blame them for trying to keep them off of their property.
If companies like SKYPE are allowed to keep piggybacking on and profiting from assets that they did not pay for at the expense of the companies and investors who did pay for them, it takes away a lot of the incentive for these companies to make future investments in new and larger pipes and risks leaving the internet suffering from a lack of investment in the future. Why would a phone company invest in the knife that slits their throat?
Netflix is another example of a company that is trying to build a business model on infrastructure that they made no investment in. They are essentially trying to be a national on-demand movie cable TV provider without making the enormous investment in building a cable network. In many respects, they are trying to steal a network that belongs to somebody else. The problem with that is that movies take a HUGE amount of bandwidth and the physical infrastructure to deliver that bandwidth is very expensive. The coax that carries cable TV around a neighborhood and to your home can only carry a few hundered channels worth of movies and a few channels worth of highspeed internet that are shared by a neighborhood. These coax cables are hugely expensive just for materials and are even more expensive to install and maintain. Why should Netflix be able to treat these networks that they did not invest a dime in as if they were there own? If they sign up two or three customers on a neighborhood they dominate the bandwidth that is available for everybody else and they degrade the service that the cable company is able to offer all the rest of its customers. How is that fair to either the cable company or the other customers who get degraded service? I don't blame the cable company for blocking them. If Netflix wants to be an on-demand cable company they should build a cable network or at least pay the internet providers for the use of theirs. Just like they pay the postoffice to send their movies around to their customers through the mail. There should be a usage fee that compensates the owner of the network for the use of the network.
The internet was build to to where it is without the help or regulation of the FCC. I frankly think that the way to keep the internet the free-form unregulated thing that it has become is to not to regulate it. I have never known regulators to make things more free. Regulators regulate. Pretty quick, the regulators will be controlled by the huge players and the main purpose of the regulations will be to erect barriers to entry against the little guys. Just little regulations that have been popping up lateley like maintaining long-term archives of web and email logs can impose huge costs on a Mom and Pop ISP. The big players will push the regulators to impose this type of regulation and pretty quick, the competition will be gone.
You're right, it can't. It can, however, set precedent that other countries can follow (if they so choose). Also, my initial comment in my post, which you were referring to when you made your statement, was not directed solely to American users. The line about users knowing what throttling is like addresses everyone, not just American readers. It wasn't until I narrowed it down that it became geared toward American readers. ProU has been opened up to international users, remember, so not everyone reading this lives in America.
You just contradicted yourself. Saying AOL isn't an ISP because AOL didn't start out as an ISP is like saying AT&T isn't an ISP because it didn't start that way.
Yes and no. I pay $45.00 a month for 7Mb/s download speeds and 512Kb/s up (I take issue with this, in and of itself, considering we're 30th as far as Internet access speeds and prices go, especially when compared to price per Mb/s, but that's a different matter altogether). I have no issue with them limiting the speed as long as they don't limit it until I reach that maximum. The problem is, though, they aren't just limiting the bandwidth to keep it under a maximum, they are limiting the bandwidth to discourage certain activities. This is very easily seen with something like Netflix. Start up a movie or show from the "Watch Instantly" queue and it will load the first time, and then within 5 minutes will adjust because the bandwidth limit has dropped (Netflix determines the bandwidth and adjusts its buffer accordingly), without anything else in our house accessing the Internet.
Actually, it's only expensive in America (at least as far as first world countries go).
Also, a T1 line is actually slower than standard cable Internet service (up to 6Mb/s, versus personal Internet service averaging at least 6Mb/s services), and a T3 line can start at $2000 a month. Yeah, you could get it, but it's prohibitively expensive for a home user and therefore does not make it a viable option.
Finally, no, I actually don't have any other options available to me. The only four broadband services in my entire city are Time Warner, Insight, Wide Open West, and Verizon (FIOS), and Time Warner, Wide Open West, and Verizon don't serve my specific area of the city. Hell, according to Verizon, I don't even exist. That leaves (surprise, surprise) Insight.
Even dial-up is out of the question because it would cost me as much to get dial-up as it would the cable Internet I currently have, as I don't have a land-based phone line. That said, dial-up can't and anymore doesn't really compete. The only reason dial-up still exists is because the 10% (and shrinking) of Americans that still use dial-up, most of them either can't afford or don't have access to broadband Internet. In other words, dial-up only exists because it has a niche market. To compare, it's not much different from Apple in the late 90s -- it didn't really compete with Microsoft and the home PC market because it held its own niche market (graphic designers and education, primarily).
That might work in areas that haven't had infrastructure updates in the past 10 years, but anything newer than that have either Fiber Optic or other high-speed backbone. We're talking into the Gigabit (1024Mb) range, and with multiple channels designed to handle the large loads that come with a large customer base especially in urban areas.
Or perhaps the RIAA should be the ones to relieve them of that burden, since it was they, not the FCC, who made agreements with the ISPs to act as watchdogs. It was also the RIAA that started holding ISPs accountable, after lawsuits against individuals stopped working.
It seems, of course, that the ISPs have said "no" anyway. So it would seem to me that your point here is actually moot.
Two words: Eminent Domain. With the transition to digital for every form of communication, the physical lines are quickly becoming a necessity in the same way the electrical lines, natural gas, and water pipes (or wells) are necessities. It's also entirely constitutional as long as the government gives them just compensation for it.
This statement, and the one I quoted before it, show a lack of understanding of how the Internet and its content works.
First of all, by your logic, telecomms (and all utilities, for that matter) should be monopolies. After all, they are the ones who put the physical lines in, they should be the only ones who can use it. Other companies use those very same physical lines. You don't see a dozen different electrical or telecomm cables in an area where there are a dozen different providers, because they use the same lines. The difference comes from whose stations or servers or switches are being used. By your logic, all your little local ISPs should be charging an arm and a leg for their service because they should be putting in their own cables everywhere, otherwise they're piggybacking off of what's already there.
Also, all content providers "piggyback" off the hardware in order to get where it's going, that's the whole point. In fact, it does it several times per site, and in some cases, several times per page depending on how the page is set up. Every site, every page that exists on the Internet does this, some more than others. And actually, the content providers do pay. They pay in the form of servers to host their content and their own Internet connection. With bandwidth-heavy providers like Skype, Netflix, and Youtube, they pay an extra premium for larger upload bandwidths.
By your logic, the only content that should exist on the Internet is whatever doesn't piggyback on a network the provider doesn't own. That would result in the only content coming from the ISPs themselves, because they're the only ones that own the lines. And even then, it would only be able to go to the people that are subscribers to that ISP and the ISP would have to have local web servers. Otherwise the content would be going through other networks, and that would be piggybacking, which, by your logic, is wrong (and if you don't think content crosses multiple networks, run a tracert on your favorite website).
Your logic also demonstrates a lack of understanding on the fundamentals of computing in general. All software "piggybacks" on hardware. Your very operating system is running on hardware that the company that created the software never paid for. You paid for that hardware. Yet the software company is making a profit off of you licensing for the privilege of using it on your hardware (and probably taking up far more resources than it should/could be). Your browser is running on that hardware, too, and that company never paid for it, and unless you're running Internet Explorer on Windows or Safari on Mac OS, the people that made your browser also didn't contribute to the creation of the Operating System it's piggybacking off of.
As I said before, they do pay. The problem is, they are still seen as competitors to the ISPs, because nearly all ISPs also serve cable TV. Skype and Vonage are also competitors because they offer voice communication services, just like the ISPs (and actually, most of the cable company/ISPs that offer "digital phone service" actually did so because of services like Vonage and Skype).
Technically speaking, they're not an "on-demand cable company." Being an "on-demand cable company" implies that it actually has all the shows from a given network. However, that could't be farther from the truth. They are severely limited in their content by several factors.
First and foremost, they're limited by the companies that make the shows and movies (this is actually causing a problem for them right now, because it's limiting the format they're allowed to use for their "watch instantly" feature, which is alienating their Linux users, which is actually a quite large group that they care about). If the company that owns the rights to a given show or movie tells Netflix they don't want them to provide the show/movie in a particular format, then Netflix has to oblige. NBC is actually doing this right now. Since they have their own Internet distribution system, they've told Netflix that they can't serve their shows via "watch instantly."
Secondly, they're limited by what's actually out on DVD. This means that, as someone who exclusively uses Netflix, I can't watch the latest episode of Lost or, until a couple weeks ago, any episode of The Cleaner or The Mentalist because they're all too new and haven't been released on DVD yet. This also means that I can't get most of the of the original Law & Order, because they haven't been released on DVD.
The on-demand ("watch instantly") portion is also limited to what they have added to their on-demand database, which is probably, at least in part, limited by the owners of the shows/movies.
Actually, they are already trying to do this, but not in the form of supposed FCC regulation. They're actively trying to squash competition through legislation that outlaws local ISPs.
The FCC isn't looking to regulate the Internet. They're looking to make sure that providers don't act in what are essentially anti-competitive, and in some cases, shady ways.
From the openinternet.gov site (emphasis mine):
In my opinion, the major part of the issue is that the companies that provide the Internet access are also content providers themselves. Many of the larger companies are also the ones that put in the lines (essentially determining who gets what kind of access and therefore what kind of user experience quality). Therefore, any content or service that can be obtained somewhere other than the Internet is competition to the very people who bring the Internet to consumers.
To quote Senator Chris Dodd, regarding banks' predatory practices (though still applicable to the FCC vs ISPs issue): "We wouldn't need legislation if the industry acted responsibly in the first place."
I am treated as evil by people who claim that they are being oppressed because they are not allowed to force me to practice what they do. ~D. Dale Gulledge
Yes and no. I pay $45.00 a month for 7Mb/s download speeds and 512Kb/s up
Those are maximum burst speeds. I bet if you read your contract more carefully you will see the words "up to" in it. It also says nothing about maximum data throughput which I'll bet is also capped and some total number of gigabytes.. I'm not sure who your provider is but to give you that type of speed, it must be a cable company that is delivering service by coax. Coax is great as a high bandwidth medium but unfortunately the cable networks were engineered for mass delivery of cable TV programming. That means that one coax delivered the same stuff to lots of different homes. It worked great for TV but not so well for internet where everybody is wanting different data. Unlike telephone service where every home has a unique two-wire pair to the central office, people on a cable have to SHARE the bandwidth.
Also, a T1 line is actually slower than standard cable Internet service (up to 6Mb/s, versus personal Internet service averaging at least 6Mb/s services),
Again you are using burst speeds and I notice above that you used the words "up to". At about 1.5 mbs, a T1 is not as fast as cable in a burst. But because it is dedicated to you rather than shared with many other users like cable, there is a very good chance that you will get higher overall throughput because a T1 will perform constantly day in day out at 1.5 mbs because it is dedicated and you don't have other customers competing for bandwidth.. There is a reason why a T1 connection costs more than a cable connection.
The internet has been engineered as a shared resource. In the days when I was doing dial-up ISP stuff I could hook 16 56k modems attached to incoming dial up lines to one 56k dedicated trunk line attached to the internet and all 16 users could share the trunk and get acceptable service. The reason was that most of the time, they were sittling idle while they read the web page. They were connected to the internet but at any given moment, few of them were actually transmitting data and then only for the few seconds it took to request a page and receive it and then they were idle again.
Things like movies have changed that because a single movie is about 5 Gb transmitted continuously over about a 2 hour period. That is a huge amount of data and means that a massive amount of bandwith needs to be dedicated to one user which means they are hogging a shared resource.
That might work in areas that haven't had infrastructure updates in the past 10 years, but anything newer than that have either Fiber Optic or other high-speed backbone.
Backbone is usually not the issue. The challenge with delivering high speed internet is the "last mile to the curb". Phone companies have tried to deliver high speed over there existing 2-wire copper pairs that they have to each home using DSL. The telephone network is well engineered for a two way data network in the sense that each house as a unique dedicated connection between the house and the central office. But unfortunately, copper pairs are not well suited to carring high bandwidth.. Cable companies have used their existing installed base of coax. Coax is much better suited to high-bandwidth applications but as explained above, the cable network is designed for distributing TV rather than internet. In that respect, their infrastructure is not nearly so well designed as the telephone network. The last mile is shared rather than dedicated as it is with the phone network.
Your logic also demonstrates a lack of understanding on the fundamentals of computing in general. All software "piggybacks" on hardware.
The difference is that you own your computer hardware and it is 100% dedicated to you. You can run whatever software you want and it does not degrade anybody else. The interent is shared. If you or a company like Netflix hogs the bandwidth, then somebody else gets degraded service. It is SHARED.
As far as my knowledge of computers go, I began my career in oil and gas and I am currently involved in oil and gas. But for almost 20 years inbetween, I was involved in computers and specifically telecommunications. I spent 8 years working for Accenture. They were the largest computer consulting company in the world. I spent almost all of that time working on telecommunications. I helped build the massive $80 million billings systems that were used when AT&T were split-up and the resulting multitude of phone companies had to bill each other when they used each others networks as their respective customers called each other. I first built this system for US West (now Qwest) and it was later sold to Sprint an NYNEX. At US WEST I started out as a green-bean programmer and by the end of the project I was managing a big chunk of the functionality. I was on the sales and installation teams at both Sprint and NYNEX. I then went to Australia and did more or less the same thing for Telecom Australia when that government-owned and heavily regulated monopoly was broken up. I was the overall project manager on that job and had 80 people working for me and billed 16 million dollars. I then owned my own small computer business and then my internet business sprang from that. I'm pretty sure I have forgotten more about computing and telecommunications then you will ever know.
As I said before, they do pay.
Who do they pay? They don't pay the cable company for use of their "last mile to the curb" network. Netflix is wanting to use this last mile which is engineered as a shared and limited resource without paying for it. There is only limited bandwidth on this last mile and if one person is downloading a movie, everybody else suffers.
Two words: Eminent Domain. With the transition to digital for every form of communication, the physical lines are quickly becoming a necessity in the same way the electrical lines, natural gas, and water pipes (or wells) are necessities. It's also entirely constitutional as long as the government gives them just compensation for it.
But I have not read anything suggesting that Obama's government was planning on coughing up half a trillion for telecom infrastructure so I think we are talking about confiscation without the "just compensation" part. I have another word for that. It is called "fascism". In the economic context, that is where the assets of private industry get co-opted to do the will of the state.
Technically speaking, they're not an "on-demand cable company
Technically speaking, they are making a portion of their library available on-demand. But you are right that they are not a cable company because they don't have any cable.. That is the problem. They have a business model that should include an investment in cable infrastructure but they are not doing it.
What we are actually seeing is a classic case of an age old economic problem called the "tragedy of the commons". Basically when a piece of land is held or available to the public at large there is a tremendous incentive for individuals to throw as many cows on that land as possible. Eventually the commons land is badly over-grazed and devalued. In this case the internet is the commons.
The FCC isn't looking to regulate the Internet.
You and I apparently took very different meaning from that web site you linked to. It seemed pretty clear that they were in fact planning to regulate the internet.
As I mentioned above, I was very involved with the telephone industry during the de-regulation process. MCI broke down the dam a little before my time but I spent years picking up the mess that was caused by the split up of AT&T and what a glorious thing it was. It was not until after de-regulation that the internet became possible. Anybody who believe regulation is going to lead to more market freedom than an unregulated free market is kidding themselves.
Regulations may start out with one intent but they invariably evolve in a direction where they protect the interests of the existing players at the expense of new entrants. This happens because there is a revolving employment door between the private sector and the regulators. Overtime, it is all the same people. And regulators more than anything else are about job security. The more of the market they bring under their control, the more power and job security they have. The result is that innovation is stiffled.
To quote Senator Chris Dodd, regarding banks' predatory practices (though still applicable to the FCC vs ISPs issue): "We wouldn't need legislation if the industry acted responsibly in the first place."
Ironic that you quote the guy who along with Barney Franks played a major role in writing the legislation that forced the banks to behave irresponsibly by lending to people who were poor credit risks.
By your logic, the only content that should exist on the Internet is whatever doesn't piggyback on a network the provider doesn't own.
By my logic, people who own the network should have some major say in the data that passes through it. The network is worthless without the content so they have a strong incentive to allow their customers to utilize most content and if they are overly restrictive they are going to lose customers to other providers with more liberal policies. That is the free-market at work. But the network is also worthless if a few people abuse the bandwidth and degrade the quality of service for everybody. The owners of the network have a balancing act to keep customers happy. They need to provide reasonable access to content and reasonable network performance. This involves trade-offs. In many cases, their interests are best served if they drive their heaviest using customers who slow the network down to their competitors and focus on providing a really good high-speed experience to the other 98% of their customers who pay the same amount of money and will be very happy with the snappy network performance.
By your logic, all your little local ISPs should be charging an arm and a leg for their service because they should be putting in their own cables everywhere, otherwise they're piggybacking off of what's already there.
I payed the phone company for each line which I used. I had several hundred phone lines into my office and I payed a monthly bill on each one of them. My customers used their phone lines (which they payed for) to dial my number and be switched onto one of my phone lines which I payed for. I then routed their requests over my trunk lines to the backbone of the internet. I also paid the phone company for my trunk lines. Telecom expenses were my biggest expense. My service was reasonably priced because everything was engineered to be SHARED. 10 incoming lines would serve 100 customers because not everybody dialed in at once. 16 incoming lines with 56 k modems attached could be serviced by one 56 k trunk because not everybody was uploading and downloading data at the same time. At any given time, most of the people connected were idle.
That is completely different from a company like Netflix which is using the network for free. They have trunk lines that connect them to the internet but they are not paying anybody for "the last mile". Their customers are paying for a last mile connection but it is a shared connection and while it offers very rapid burst speeds it is not capable of sustained connections sufficient for movie delivery without causing everybody else to experience service degradation. A person who is downloading a 2-hour movie does not go idle. On-demand movies are an application that does not belong on a shared network. Tragedy of the commons.
And when gas, electric, or water utlitles use infrastructure that belongs to another company to service one of their customers, they pay a fee to the company that owns the infrastructure. That is what is missing from the Netflix and Skype business models. They are not paying the local companies for the use of their "last mile" networks. That was exactly the purpose of the systems I mentioned above that I built for phone companies using each other's networks.
Alright, our discussion is getting to the point where it's taking me all day to reply to any of your replies. I'm going to have to drop the matter simply for the sake of time. I think we have a fundamental disagreement on the matter, anyway, so we'd probably just end up going in circles.
However, I have done some research, at least regarding how Netflix runs the streaming portion of their business, and I thought I'd share it with you. It's just pretty much going to be a link dump, though, for you to read at your convenience.
That said, and before I get into the link dump, I did want to comment on your "I'm pretty sure I have forgotten more about computing and telecommunications then you will ever know," line.
First, I'm impressed with your background. The main reason that I can't contend with that is sheer age. I've only just begun out in the workplace and therefore simply don't have the experience under my belt to be able to say "I've done these things."
However, while your statement may very well be true about telecommunications, I contend that it's not the case with computing in general. For one, the sheer amount of knowledge available in computing would allow for both of us to gain equal amounts of knowledge, yet have very little overlap. Second, Moore's Law dictates that, simply from sheer volume of knowledge, that I will, in the end, end up with more knowledge, known and forgotten, than you, just as the next generation will end up with more knowledge than we ever had, assuming we continue on our current paths (as individuals) of expanding our knowledge of the technologies of our day.
Therefore, I would argue that if we were the same age, you and I would have roughly the same amount of knowledge in regards to computing, but the content of our knowledge would be different, as you seem to have gone down a path that consists more of networking and some programming involved with, whereas I have gone down more of an end-user path that works more with hardware and desktop/web application development.
As a side note to provide my background, so that it doesn't seem so vague: I've spent the past 12 years or so building and repairing computers at a hardware level in various situations, ranging from my own computers to freelance tech support to structured tech support for Best Buy, Circuit City, and Capital University Law School. Some of my time in school was also spent tinkering with robots and building (with transistors and logic chips) and programming (at the logic gate level) circuit boards for various purposes. I then spent a year at a company called Information Control Corporation (ICC), which is one of Ohio's leading software consulting companies (to give you and idea, since you're probably not familiar with them, their clients include Victoria Secret, the NBA, the Ohio Department of Job and Family Services, American Electric Power, BMW, Nationwide Insurance, and Microsoft). (It would have been longer, but I was a victim of the economy and got laid off due to lack of work from clients.) I was there as a developer, and had the chance to learn bleeding edge technologies. I'm currently working on building my own business as a freelance/contract developer, in light of the lack of "corporate world" jobs, currently, in my area.
Anywho, without further ado, here is the link dump I promised, for your reading pleasure.
Netflix blog entry describing their encoding technology.
Third party look at Netflix's cost to stream media, as well as some numbers on the sizes of the movies streamed.
A look at Verizon FiOS and how it differs from cable, especially in regards to the capping/throttling issue.
Comcast's blog regarding the FCC thing (includes comments from users, which I think are also worth reading).
After doing a little more looking (in part because I wanted to make sure I got everything I had found a couple days ago), I found a couple interesting things you might be interested in, too.
AT&T vs Google Voice regarding net neutrality. It seems just posting the ideas the FCC has in regards to net neutrality is enough for them to start policing themselves. If that's the case, I have no problem if the FCC doesn't need to take further action (as long as what has currently been done continues to be effective). My issue, though, is that something needs to be changed.
And, as always, Slashdot has some interesting discussions on the topic.
And another from Slashdot.
PC World's point of view on the matter.
I am treated as evil by people who claim that they are being oppressed because they are not allowed to force me to practice what they do. ~D. Dale Gulledge
Really nice post. I am not so sure that I would even trust the FCC to handle regulating or "freeing" the internet. I don't know how much that you know about Mark Lloyd, but he is kinda out there. http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2009/08/10/pub-fccs-new-hire-previously-...
I do however, agree with your statement about the lack of options in service providers. In the area where I live, we have two terrible providers. You get either Comcast, or another provider ( I can't remember the name) and neither of them is terribly reliable.
I also agree with Jackbenimble, the best way to regulate something, especially like the internet, is to put very minimal regulations on it. I only say minimal due to child porn and things of that sort.
Thanks for hearing me out,
gamerchic